Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 i Wilderness

THE NUMBER OF Great Walks has more than doubled after DOC announced 14 Great Short Walks and five Great Day Walks. Conservation Minister Maggie Barry said the list included world famous walks and “relatively unknown gems” to draw tourists off the beaten track. The list includes walks that already attract tens of thousands of visitors, including the Tongariro Alpine Crossing (TAC), Cathedral Cove Walk on the Coromandel Peninsula, the Fox Glacier Valley Walk and the Hooker Valley Track in Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park. DOC has partnered with Tourism New Zealand to promote the walks to New Zealanders and overseas visitors. The walks were assessed by local DOC staff as being able to accommodate an increase in visitors. “DOC’s own research has shown tourists are looking for shorter, easier experiences and…

CLEAR SKIES AND freezing temperatures made for perfect conditions for the sixth Remark-ables Ice and Mixed Festival. About 150 people competed in this year’s event, which raised about about $20,000 for the Expedition Climbers Club. The club formed three years ago and has about 200 members. It was established to support climbers heading overseas on long expeditions. Last year, the club embarked on its first major expedition – a trip to the Cordillera Blanca mountain range in Peru, where 12 club members pioneered three new routes on Mt Taulliraju (5830m). The club’s next expedition will be to Peshawar in India.…

IF YOU WANT to be a landscape painter, it’s probably a good idea to go where there’s landscape to die for. It’s what 22-year-old artist Caroline Bellamy did. From an 18-day tramp in Mt Aspiring National Park, she produced a series of striking landscape paintings. “I focused on observing the landscape and immersing myself in this wild and rugged area,” says Bellamy, who graduated with a Bachelor of Painting from Christchurch School of Fine Arts last year. She’d tramped with her family from an early age, and now she has chosen art as her career, she has merged her two passions. While studying, she joined the Canterbury University Tramping Club and went on regular, and often ambitious, tramping trips. “Art and tramping have naturally fed into each other,” Bellamy says.…

ABOVE THE TREELINE there is an invasion taking place. As the climate warms, alpine plants are creeping higher up the mountains to find the cool conditions where they can survive. But new research has found alien plants are twice as likely to take their place. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, looked at how plants were spreading into alpine areas in Italy, but a Kiwi scientist involved in the research says New Zealand could be even more vulnerable than Europe. Lincoln University biology professor Philip Hulme is an expert on how weeds spread. He says, although New Zealand’s climate is warming at about half the rate of Europe, we have far more weeds ready to leap up the slopes as the snowline retreats. “We are probably the weediest area…

Earth Sea Sky BRAND OF THE YEAR WITH FIVE GENERATIONS of manufacturing experience, the Ellis family’s products have been on expeditions that have become part of the fabric of Kiwi exploration, including Sir Edmund Hillary’s first summit of Everest and his pioneering expedition to the South Pole. Coming from such stock, it’s not surprising Earth Sea Sky has been named Brand of the Year. Company founder David Ellis’ great great grandfather started Arthur Ellis & Co, which began producing outdoor products in the 1920s under the Fairy-down brand. Fairydown became a pioneer in developing sleeping bags and jackets, which were later used on the first New Zealand expeditions in the Himalaya. Ellis’ father was also part of Hillary’s ‘dash to the pole’ expedition, which reached the South Pole on tractors…

Deep beneath the Paparoa Range, in the dust on the Metro/Te Ananui cave system floor, there’s still a few faint footprints and pawprints, their edges outlined in the shadows of our headlamps. According to Mark, our Underworld Adventures caving guide, they’ve been undisturbed since they were left there in 1963, by a man called Johnny Currie and his dog, Chum. The pair were the first to explore the cave, stepping into the darkness with nothing but a sputtering candle. Today, however, we have headlamps, helmets, full wetsuits, and a large inner tube that will take us blackwater rafting under a constellation of glow-worms, before a gentle ride down the Nile River and a bush tram back to base. Winter is a great time to visit to escape the summer tourist…

When you move to a new town, making friends is high on the list of things to do. For Karen Griffiths, the easiest way to do that when she moved to New Plymouth in 2012 was to join the local tramping club. A keen tramper all her life, she knew she’d find camaraderie and people she could lace up her boots with on the weekend. But what she didn’t expect when she signed up to the New Plymouth Tramping Club, was to be treated like a novelty. “I’m in my 50s, and they were saying ‘Oh great, a young one’,” Griffiths recalls. The club had nearly 400 members and, according to Griffiths, an average age somewhere north of 70. They were also vastly experienced trampers who knew every nook and…

With spring warming the air, our thoughts turn to adventure, dreaming of epic summer missions, perhaps extending our backcountry legs a little further than we did last year. It is the ideal time of year to get prepared, to stock the first-aid kit, review your skill-set and increase your fitness level so you’re mentally and physically confident for whatever task you’re setting yourself. First aid readiness Now is the time to review your first-aid readiness, from refreshing your training to updating and replenishing your first aid kit. “Any injury you can imagine, you can obtain in the outdoors,” says Brent Hollow, who has spent a lifetime in first aid and is trained in advanced cardiac life support with a postgraduate degree in paramedicine and emergency management. He’s been involved with…

CAMERON VALLEY AND its promise of a barren and hostile landscape at the end of its namesake glacier had caught our attention on a previous trip to the region. Nothing says ‘abandon all hope’ quite like glacial moraine. Our group of three parked at the entrance to Cameron Valley. We signed the intentions book and set off, walking along Cameron River. We soon wished for shade. Just half an hour into our trip we were steaming in our boots, with not a single tree for shelter. The grade of the partially poled route varied between well-defined and non-existent. Knowing that no river crossings were required, we stayed on the true right of Cameron River. It guided us to our destination, even where the route was lost in dense, bloodthirsty scrub.…

FOR ALL THEIR urban preoccupations, Aucklanders are blessed with a superb array of rugged day walks just beyond the city’s fringes. The Lake Wainamu Loop Track, in the region’s wild west, is one of the very best; a two-hour hike, just inland from the pounding surf of Te Henga (Bethells Beach), combining rainforest with a taste of the Sahara. Starting and ending at the car park on Bethells Road, beside the bridge over Waiti Stream, there is a choice of two routes to Lake Wainamu: along a track following the shallow stream (30 minutes); or up and over an enormous inland dune system (25 minutes). I couldn’t resist the dunes and it was a unique experience I didn’t regret. Crossing these mighty sandhills is surreal. Seemingly fringed on all sides…

THE WATER QUALITY of one of the world’s most pristine lakes is under threat from an increase in the number of visitors. NIWA testing has found the water clarity at Blue Lake in Nelson Lakes National Park is among the highest in the world, with 63m visibility – almost optically pure. But senior DOC ranger Phil Crawford said this had led to a boom in its popularity and campers had been defecating near the lake and washing in the water. “It’s incredibly disappointing that people don’t treat it with the respect it deserves,” Crawford said. “Over time, that will inevitably have an affect on water quality.” The lake is also part of the Te Araroa Trail, which had seen a sharp rise in numbers. The number of hut nights at…

THE LARGEST DOC hut in the country – Pinnacles Hut in Coromandel – will be closed until at least December 20, after heavy rain washed out the main access road and tracks. The 80-bunk hut has been closed since storms hit the region in March. DOC senior ranger Bill Horgan said significant work was required to remove slips and resurface parts of Kauaeranga Valley Road. Alternative routes to the hut were also damaged. There was a major slip on Billy Goat Track, which would be repaired this month, but the hut would remain closed until Kauaeranga Valley Road reopened. A bridge on the Rangihau Track was also washed out and wouldn’t be repaired until next year. DOC has used the opportunity to make repairs to the hut.…

IT’S DARK, WET, cold, claustrophobic – unsurprisingly, Neil Silverwood says he became frustrated trying to convince friends he’s not crazy spending a week underground, exploring New Zealand’s vast cave systems. It was bringing the allure of these subterranean worlds to the surface that first motivated him to pick up a camera in 2014. “You get back to normal life and tell your friends about it and they would say ‘it sounds awful’,” Silverwood says. “They don’t understand caves can be amazing spaces, so I took a camera down.” But the same factors that make caving a challenge also mean taking a photo is incredibly difficult. “It’s the toughest environment you can imagine. You’re covered in dirt, the lighting’s complex, and it's wet and cold all the time. You can’t shoot…

MOUNTAIN BEECH TREES flecked with lichen rise on one ridge above the Ashley River, while tawny grasses flank the opposite bank. That’s the location for the six-bunk Youngman Stream Hut. Canterbury’s foothills frequently offer accessible tramping options when bad weather hounds the higher mountains of the Main Divide. Lying north of the inland expanses of the Lees Valley, the Puketeraki Forest Conservation Area covers 6750ha and boasts two huts. Both can be linked on a lovely two to three day circuit. From the 4WD access road, a marked route goes up the Ashley River, climbs onto the tops of Lilburne Hill (1405m), and leads to the beautifully situated Tarn Hut (four bunks). Then there’s a pleasant amble over Lilburne Hill, down through stunted mossy mountain beech, to the Ashley River…

We woke on the morning of January 1 to pouring rain. The only bird we’d see that day would be a half-drowned blackbird sheltering beneath our car on the driveway. “Look kids, a blackbird!” It wasn’t an auspicious start to our ‘Big Year’ of bird spotting. We’d been looking for a way to get outside more as a family, to introduce our three young boys Ollie (9), Zef (6) and Jay (3) to the New Zealand outdoors that we grew up exploring, but that they hadn’t really been exposed to yet. We wanted something that would give our family outings more purpose without costing the earth. Around the same time, we happened to watch the film The Big Year which charts the adventures of three birders as they travel all…

FOR HIS 60TH birthday, Phillip Melchior set his sights on climbing Aoraki/Mt Cook. Being in the outdoors had always been a part of life for this former journalist and business executive, but it wasn’t until he retired to Wanaka that he began to get back into tramping and mountaineering. “I knew to climb Aoraki successfully, I’d probably have to be fitter than I’ve ever been, and it’s a different sort of fit. It’s an endurance fit,” Melchior says. “I’d been climbing a little with [alpine guide and Wanaka SAR volunteer] Gary Dickson and I asked him, ‘would Mt Cook be a reasonable goal for me?’ He said no, I was too fat and my crampon technique wasn’t reasonable enough. So I worked on my skills and I set out to…

WHAKAARI CONSERVATION AREA may be a relatively new reserve, but it’s an area with plenty of history. It was a hub of scheelite mining (calcium tungstate), that was used, especially during war time, to harden steel for armaments. The area, near Glenorchy, was of key importance during the early 1800s through to the 1900s and many miners lived here, braving the harsh mountain conditions. There are several old huts and mining relics around the area, including tracks that were cut for access to mines around the mountain sides. Mt Alaska (1965m) is accessible via an old trail from Mt Judah Road. It’s a good day out, with plenty of vertical rise, a changing horizon and the chance to explore the remains of mining equipment to break up the journey. The…

THE LANDMARK SIGN at Bluff, signalling the end of the Te Araroa Trail, will be corrected, after Wilderness reader Earle Hasse found the Cape Reinga and Wellington signs pointed in the wrong directions. The sign, which points to various landmarks, has Cape Reinga and Wellington around the wrong way (‘A curious sign’, September 2017), but Invercargill City Council, which was responsible for the sign, maintained it was accurate. It has since investigated the matter and council roading manager Russell Pearson said it needs some “small adjustments”. “I am unsure when and how this has occurred, but we will make some changes to get it as right as possible,” Pearson said. “We are planning to get this underway and, given the importance of the sign to the tourist photo opportunities, we…

THE CAR PARK for the Gertrude Saddle Track, just before Homer Tunnel, is regularly overflowing in summer, as people head to what’s been described as the best alpine view in the country. The four to six hour return walk provides one of the few accessible pathways into the upper reaches of the Darran Mountains, an arterial range of the Main Divide. Boosted by rave online reviews, the track, once only frequented by experienced trampers, is attracting hordes of people, many unaware and unprepared for the risks of the mountains. “It’s an amazing place – one of the most beautiful in the world – but it’s tricky country,” Dunedin rock climbing instructor Dave Brash says. “Last summer I came across two people coming down with babies in backpacks. That’s what’s happening…

THE SPARROW-SIZED fernbird (matata) is more often heard than seen. It prefers thick vegetation, reeds and grasses, earning itself the nickname ‘mouse bird’. Fernbirds are widely, though patchily, distributed in dense wetland vegetation throughout New Zealand, but are absent from the southern North Island (apart from Waikanae Estuary) and Canterbury. Other habitats include pakihi vegetation and reedbeds growing in salt marshes on the West Coast, dry shrub land near North Cape and tussock-covered frost flats up to 1000m in Tongariro and Kahurangi national parks. They are a long-tailed songbird, streaked predominantly brown above and pale below. The breast is also spotted dark brown. Most birds have a natural ‘part’ running down the centre of the chest. The most conspicuous feature is the loosely-barbed brown tail feathers which have a decidedly…

You guys are crazy!” would usually be the first thing people said after we told them our plans to spend two weeks packrafting and hiking the Hollyford-Pyke loop in Fiordland with our 16-month-old daughter Maya. But we didn’t feel it was crazy at all: my husband Seon and I have experience in offtrack travel, and we both have wilderness first responder training, so we knew how to prepare for the trip and make ourselves – and our daughter – as safe as possible. We’d be covering 144km on land over at least 10 days. We had a secret weapon: an Alpacka packraft, which one of us would use to paddle our heavy packs while the other walked with Maya. Speed was not our goal. We wanted to enjoy the journey…

THE PROMISE OF only four hours walking and a gentle gradient lured our group on an overnight trip to Mitre Flats Hut by way of Barra Track. At first, our spirits high, we headed along the easy farm track beside the Waingawa River, which was flecked with white riffles and punctuated with massive rocks. It ran clear and shallow enough for us to see its stony bed. After half an hour in showery weather, we climbed away from the farm on to the bush-clad sides of the river gorge. The Barra Track follows the Waingawa River upstream, with most of the tramping through the bush above the river. Underfoot was wet and slippery – wet rocks and ladders of roots made for slow progress. It was ‘hands-on’ walking. One moment…